what do you think about cell shading ?

...and the prime example that XIII didn't look as cartoonish as it might have is: it looks as if half the art team didn't know they were working on a cel-shaded game, as roughly half the textures are of photo-quality. When doing cel-shading, the textures themselves are extremely important.

In my opinion, cel-shading is maybe the single most important graphics innovation since 3D. It's the boldest stylistic move towards breaking the 3D-inspired trend of attempting photorealism in games (which is, I think, a misled goal which I doubt will ever truly be achieved).
In the beginning we had the pixel and the vector, but now that computers can display photo-quality images, video games no longer have an inherent "natural" stylism. Cel-shading is the most promising example of an attempt to recapture a unique stylism post-3D.
However if the industry gets lazy we may end up imitating comic books as much as we've been imitating film.

Well, I don't know if it's the most important, since it's appeal is more limited then realism, but it's a great thing for certain types of games, and definitely a step in the right direction for others, since it promotes the idea of unique styles to express games' ideas.

-jph

btw: i disagree that true photo-realism will never be achieved in games-- look at the LOTR or Matrix movies, for instance-- its only a matter of time before computers have the power to render that sort of work in real-time.

Artifex0 Wrote:Well, I don't know if it's the most important, since it's appeal is more limited then realism

By saying this you imply that appeal dictates what is important for the medium (which I strongly disagree with). I think the boldness of cel-shading's sacrifice of some appeal for the advancement of technique is worlds more admirable and important than are attempts at looking "real."

Artifex0 Wrote:look at the LOTR or Matrix movies, for instance-- its only a matter of time before computers have the power to render that sort of work in real-time.

That sort of graphical detail, yes. The fluid motion and expressiveness of the animation (which was mainly the result of motion capture) will take much longer for us to understand, much less synthesize on the fly (human motion synthesis is a very young field). As you say, it's a matter of time, but with those combined factors I think we're talking about a lot of time. And by that time I think the industry will have outgrown its urges to duplicate reality photorealistically.

Well, you may be right, but in my own opinion, the main purpose of 3D games is escapism, rather then artistic expression, so importance should be based on how well things achieve that.

Cell-shading lets people who enjoy comic books and animations to escape into those worlds, and it certainly promotes boldness and new avenues for graphics, but for the purpose of escapism, I don't think it's more important then realism.

An argument could be made that since many computer/video games are basically cartoony, such games would all work to some extent as cell shaded. If you consider that one way to think of comics is as simplifications of realistic artwork, then the 3D models in most games being also simplifications seems consistent with cel shading. I'm a comic fan so generally I like the think black lines, although I don't always like the simplified colouring. But then there are really many styles of comic drawing. I think "cel shading" as an either/or is a bit simplistic. Art direction in games has lots of room to expand beyond that.